Let’s face it, classroom technology is continuing to change at an astounding pace. You need solutions partners with the flexibility and agility to keep pace with the market, introduce new technologies, and integrate solutions into your curriculum and infrastructure. ATS is investing time and resources to explore, evaluate and partner with manufacturers and vendors that bring lower costs, increase student engagement, establish equity, make effective use of existing tools and integrate new tools into the classroom.

It’s an amazing time we’re living in. From interactive panels to 1:1 solutions, from virtual reality to drones…ATS is the education-focused solutions provider you need. We assist with solution design, implementation and training. All of our technologies have multiple options for professional development to get the instructors the training they need and IT the know-how to support the solutions.

Interactive Solutions

Interactive technologies have come a long way. They are no longer just about interacting with instructor-developed content. Now, you can interact with application your students are interacting with on a regular basis. You can mirror student devices to the front of the room to see their work. And you can push content to 1:1 devices.

An interactive panel is like having a tablet at the front of the room that all your students can view. You download and access apps just like you would on a smartphone. These types of technologies are giving teachers flexibility they’ve never before had at the front of the room.

1:1 Devices

ATS assists in 1:1 deployments from the beginning to the end. We design the solution and validate integration with existing technologies. We provide demo units of multiple manufacturers and OS’s and assist the institution in identifying the right OS for their environment given the outcomes they want to achieve, current infrastructure, the organization and the security posture. We plan the roll-out, providing imaging and implementation services, asset tagging and training.

Virtual Reality

Let's face it, education is constrained primarily by one thing…budget. And it demands primarily one thing…outcomes. Those two things intersect in the world of VR and provide use cases that all schools have to consider. Imagine if science and engineering students could perform experiments that would never be possible due to budget constraints and safety issues. Language arts students could learn languages by interacting with virtual characters instead of listening to audio or traveling to distant lands. Art students could create in any medium without expensive tools. All of these applications effect the bottom line.

But there are even more applications once you're specifically looking at outcomes. Experience anatomy by traveling through the body, explore the solar system in person, graph complex mathematical equations, develop storyboards with your hands, engineer models without the need for complex 3D tools. These kind of applications will all affect the outcomes for students. And then there are uses like remote learning. Imagine being remote but virtually “present” in a classroom setting with a teacher in front of you and other students sitting next to you.

STEM in the Classroom

Several districts and schools are incorporating courses dedicated to STEM. Others are finding way to incorporate STEM into existing coursework. We believe the latter is the most beneficial to students because it lets them start to understand a multidisciplinary approach.

One of the ways that instructors can incorporate STEM is through the introduction of drones. Drones are being utilized across fields of study in new and interesting ways every day. University of Maryland Robert H. Smith School of Business published in article in 2015 that already listed ways drones were being used. They cited uses in supply chain logistics, wildlife conservation, insurance adjustment, farming, 3-D mapping, meteorology, search and rescue, surveys and videography. And that was two years ago!

Now drones are being used in the collection of forensics, to air drop life vests and other resources in hard to reach places during natural disasters, for surveillance and to locate criminals (for example in a hostage situation), in building construction by scanning as portions are complete, to identify when disease is affecting farmland and when nitrogen levels are low, in thermal imaging to identify poachers of big game in far off places, in airline inspections to quickly get to hard-to-reach spots. And in the future, imagine being able to save lives with the quick delivery of a defibrillator or anti-venom or epinephrine when a person needs it.